Rushing back, he fought the plunger into place and shoved the syringe into his waistband. He slowed before the turn, tried to catch his breath. Cayanne was on his feet by his door, looking concerned.
Mike drew close, bowed his head. ‘Can I have a moment alone with Kat? To tell her?’
‘Sure, we’ll leave you my office.’
That had been Mike’s fear. He needed to get Kat out of the bullpen area entirely to make a move for the exit. Graham was probably on the third floor by now, winding his way back to them.
Plan B: out with the prop.
Mike walked over and crouched in front of Kat, slipping the syringe into her front pocket – they’d frisked him, but not her. She looked down, brow furrowed, perplexed.
He said loudly, ‘My God, honey. Your color. Didn’t I give you your insulin shot this morning?’
‘What—’
‘Honey, I know you hate needles, but this isn’t the time.’ He squeezed her shoulders: Please go along with me.
A familiar glint broke through her glassy eyes. She nodded.
He made a big show of checking her forehead, then turned, fearful that Graham was already barging around the corner, but there was just Cayanne and a few officers drawing near, concerned.
Mike channeled the Couch Mother. ‘Cold and clammy, you need some candy. Dry and hot, you need a shot.’ He patted her pockets. ‘Where’s your insulin? Do you have your insulin?’
Kat withdrew the syringe, and he made a quick grab for it, enfolding it in his hand, doing his best to hide the wide plastic tip. She went a little weak-kneed, overdoing it, but Mike grabbed her arm and stiffened her up. Listening for Graham’s approach, he didn’t find it hard to act concerned. ‘I have to administer this in her thigh. Mind if I take her to the bathroom for a little privacy?’
‘Sure,’ Maxwell said. ‘My mother-in-law’s diabetic. I know how that goes.’
Nodding his thanks, Mike shepherded Kat through the cops and around the turn, her hand clenching the polar bear. ‘Dad, what was tha—’
They were flying up the hall now, past the bathroom. ‘I need you to follow my lead so I can get us out of here.’ He dumped the leaky syringe into a trash bin just inside a doorway. ‘And I’ll answer all your questions later. Deal?’
Through the open door and an interior office window, Graham flashed into view, charging up the parallel hall on the opposite side of the floor.
‘Dea—’
Mike clamped a hand over Kat’s mouth and jerked back, flattening against the wall. Cops buzzed in the surrounding offices; at some point someone was going to step through a doorway and see them hiding here.
He could hear Graham’s elevated voice. ‘—known terrorist in your custody. Perhaps you can explain to me why a hospital clerk was able to get me his location before you thought—’
And the aggressively calm reply. ‘He’s back this way, sir.’
As Graham’s voice drifted toward Cayanne’s office, Mike propelled Kat down the hall the other way. It seemed their movement was linked to Graham’s, two points on a pulley cable sliding in opposite directions.
They reached the terminus and stepped into a pass-through office, sliding behind two desk detectives hunkered into burritos. Neither raised his head. With Kat keeping pace at his side, Mike scurried through doorways and down corridors, waiting for red lights to flash, alarms to erupt, security barriers to lower.
At last a stairwell. They jostled down and spilled out into an open garage, a host of police cars pulled in for service or washing. To their right a wide ramp angled up to the side lot that Graham had been standing in moments before.
A faint ding-ding-dinging sounded from that direction, too subdued to be an alarm.
The overweight cop whom Graham had argued aside was trudging right at them, lugging his bulletproof vest and shotgun.
Mike froze, hand clamping the back of Kat’s neck.
‘Lost?’ the cop asked.
Mike let a breath leak through his teeth. ‘No. I’m doing some work.’
‘Yeah?’ The smile seemed friendly. ‘What kind of work?’
The dinging continued relentlessly, a bird pecking on Mike’s spine. The pause felt as though it dragged out several minutes.
‘That flickering light in the lobby,’ Kat said.
Mike scratched his forehead with a thumb, grabbing the life-line his daughter had thrown him. ‘Right. Probably just a loose connection, but you always worry about arcing, you know? So we’re off to check the breakers.’ He pointed vaguely up the ramp.
The man flicked his chin at Kat. ‘She your assistant?’
Mike shot a glance back at the stairwell door. ‘It’s Bring Your Kid to Work Day.’
‘I thought that was in April.’
He’d heard of it?
‘They changed the date,’ Mike said. ‘Conflicted with Talk Like a Pirate Day.’
The man studied him, head cocked, and then his serious expression broke and he gave a big laugh. Stepping aside, he swept a hand at the ramp.
Mike unlocked his muscles and headed for daylight. The dinging grew louder as he hustled Kat up the ramp. They stepped into the sudden bright, the sun winking harshly off the domino row of windshields. All those matching patrol cars, neatly aligned, as if for sale. Slanted in the middle of the aisle, door still flung open, issuing the nerve-grating dings, was Graham’s Mercury Grand Marquis. A barbed-wire-topped fence hemmed everything in. On the ground before the exit at the lot’s end lay a thick black sensor cable, requiring the weight of an automobile to open the imposing electronic gate.
An angry banging overhead.
Mike looked up. Hammering the window three floors above, his face tight and angry, Graham bellowed down at them. He stood where Mike had been minutes earlier; in fact, they’d reversed positions exactly. Graham’s mouth wavered, spit flecking the glass, but his outrage, from below, was soundless. Standing beside him, looking not entirely displeased, was Cayanne.
Mike glanced from Graham to the electronic gate to the black Mercury. The door alarm meant the key was in the ignition. ‘Come on.’
Before Kat could get the passenger door closed behind her, Mike was accelerating toward the gate. As it rattled arthritically open, he dug the truck keys from his pocket. His fist guiding the wheel, he squeaked through the gap early, the gate’s edge grinding the side of the car and throwing up sparks. He screeched across the street and into the main parking lot, raking the tires the wrong way across the security spikes. The rubber shredded, Graham’s car skidding sideways, throwing sparks and grinding to a halt. Mike and Kat leaped out and into the pickup, and then they were motoring away, his eyes clicking from rearview to side mirror. The rucksack full of cash and the few plastic bags of their stuff rolled at Kat’s feet. Dusk was coming on, cutting visibility, making him feel incrementally safer. He accelerated through a red, cut up an alley, hit the freeway entrance on a slide, and ran the blacktop the length of two exits. Kat’s eyes were bright, and Mike realized that this was, in a manner, exciting for her.
Back on darkening residential streets, he prowled like the teenager he used to be. He passed over the German makes. He’d heard they had fancy security systems these days, the antilock brakes kicking in and the steering shutting down before you pulled away from the curb. And even if you cracked a glove box and lucked into a valet key, there was still LoJack, GPS. He needed something from his era, something he could work like a Rubik’s Cube.
A brown Honda Civic with a late-eighties body was nestled to the curb beside a high hedge, the nearest house quiet behind a substantial setback. Mike parked behind the car and hopped out. It occurred to him that each successive vehicle he’d taken was a stepping-stone to a prior time.
‘Grab our stuff.’
But Kat was too fascinated to obey. As he dug in the wheel-well toolbox, she watched from the curb, swiveling one leg and chewing her cheek. He didn’t find a crowbar, but there was a length of stiff electrical wire that he doubled, forming a ho
ok with one end. His hands seemed to shape the wire by themselves, on muscle-memory autopilot. Clenching the wire between his teeth, he shoved a hammer into his back pocket and carried two flathead screwdrivers to the Honda. At the driver’s side, he jammed both screwdrivers between the top of the window and the rubber guard, about two inches apart, opening up a small gap.
‘Dad?’
The wire slid through, the hook grabbed the notched lock, and he was in.
‘Dad?’
Three smacks of the hammer knocked off the plastic ignition keyhole, and the wider screwdriver fit the hole. A turn of his wrist and the engine purred to life.
‘Dad?’
Finally he registered Kat’s voice and looked up. She was standing a few feet off the driver’s window, arms crossed, mouth slightly ajar with wonder.
‘Where’d you learn that?’
Chapter 36
His back stiff, his gaze constant on the door, Shep sat at Annabel’s side. Her chest rose and fell under her own power, the breaths long and sonorous. She was puffy around the eyes, bloated from IV fluids. The monitor ticked off hills and valleys.
The knob turned, and Dr Cha entered. Only Shep’s eyes moved.
It was late, and the halls were quiet.
She said, ‘I’m sorry, Shep, but visiting hours ended forty-five minutes ago. You’ll have to go now.’
‘I can’t.’
‘There’s nothing I can do. These rooms are for patients only.’
Shep reached over, plucked a Pyrex supply canister from the counter, and shattered it in his hand. Swabs and shrapnel fell at his feet. With a jagged shard, he carved a three-inch gash along the back of his forearm. Tendrils of blood snaked down his hand, running off his fingertips, drops pattering on the tile.
He parted the dividing curtain, moved to the empty bed across from Annabel, and sat. ‘I need stitches.’
‘You idiot. I should call security.’
‘From what I’ve seen of them, go ahead.’
She stepped in, letting the door suck closed behind her. A stare-down. ‘You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, you heard me.’
Shep said, ‘I will pay for the room. Cash – no HMO-insurance bullshit. But I want this bed.’
‘This is a hospital, not a cabana at Skybar.’ She snapped the phone off the wall, punched a button. ‘Security, please.’
Shep pointed across to Annabel with a blood-wet finger. ‘Your patient is in danger.’
Uncertainty showed on the doctor’s face. Quickly replaced by anger. ‘You don’t know that. The cops said she’s fine. That you’re the criminal.’
‘I am a criminal. But you don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to find out that they’ve killed her.’
She kept the phone pressed to her ear. ‘Even if I could have men and women cohabiting in the same room, a few stitches don’t buy you the surgical ICU. They buy you ten minutes with a first-year intern in the ER.’
The faint voice on the other end came clearly audible off the hard surfaces. ‘Security. Security. Do you have a problem?’
Shep raised the glittering shard to his face. ‘Then what do I have to cut?’
Driving inland. A Honda Civic, his eight-year-old daughter, an unmarked revolver, and a rucksack stuffed with just shy of a quarter mil. The purple sky, half lit by the descended sun, had a portentous cast. An electronic billboard flashed a child-abduction alert, but they were past before Mike registered that it referred to Kat. He’d switched the license plates, keeping the ones he’d taken from Jimmy’s girlfriend’s Mazda, so the stolen car shouldn’t raise any red flags. Freeway signs blinked overhead, waystations on a road to nowhere. He blazed past artichoke fields, a biblical swarm of grasshoppers unfurling from the crops and splattering against the windshield, Kat noting each plop with sickened delight.
Mike had explained to her, as best he could, what they were up against, but she mostly wanted to chatter about his boosting the vehicle.
‘And then you were, like, crack! with the hammer, and the car just started up. And then switching the plates like a bank robber. That was so cool.’
Her manic engagement with selective aspects of their ordeal, he figured, was self-protective, so he let her go, a windup toy that wouldn’t unwind. She slapped at the old-fashioned radio. A scroll through static, voices burping from the speakers as the dial flew. Amy Winehouse wouldn’t go to rehab, saying no no no, and Kat was digging through the glove box, captivated by the lipstick, the breath mints, a half-smoked pack of menthols. She posed, cigarette in mouth, to see if he’d comment, but he barely noticed her until she started in with the fake puffing. She was spoiling for a fight, wanting him to give her an excuse to let go and cry. But he didn’t have it in him right now, so he let her air-smoke until she grew bored with it.
At the next rest stop, he climbed out, grabbed the rucksack, and headed for a pay phone. ‘Stay close.’
Carrying Snowball II with her, Kat sat at a rickety picnic table nearby. Mike used the calling card to reach Hank on his cell.
‘Hank—’
But Hank cut Mike off before he could get out another word. ‘I’m camped out near a pay phone. Call me back at this number.’ He repeated it twice.
Mike dialed the new number, and when Hank snatched up the phone, his voice was trembling. ‘You’re okay. You got out.’
‘Barely. You’re being monitored?’
‘Dunno. But I’m a paranoid cop at heart. With the resources against you . . .’
Mike said, ‘Who the hell is this guy Rick Graham?’
‘A director at the State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center.’
‘So I’m a terrorist now?’ Mike said. ‘This just keeps getting better.’
Over on the park bench, Kat glanced up at him.
‘That’s why I couldn’t get a handle on that alert they put out on you,’ Hank said. ‘The routing request was so convoluted – it’s all classified, higher-up shit. I finally reached a former partner’s kid, a DA, who broke the code for me.’
‘What’s this center? Why have I never heard of it?’
‘It’s one of these multiagency deals. Graham’s out of the main joint in Sacramento. They call it a “fusion center” to make it sound imposing.’
‘It does sound imposing.’
‘They pull the best and brightest from CHP, California DOJ, the governor’s office – got the whole goddamned state under their thumb. The sheriff’s an agent of the state, so that explains why his boys were first to the dance.’
An unhealthy wheeze punctuated each of Hank’s inhalations. The scale of what Mike was confronting left him breathless, too. Graham had personally come down to L.A. to take him into custody.
A bitter laugh escaped Mike’s lips. ‘Green houses.’ He punched the wall in slowmotion, pressing his knuckles to the splintering wood. ‘When this started, I thought it was about phony green houses.’
Across the parking area, a family unloaded from a station wagon, stretching their legs and bucket-lining empty cups and wadded wrappers from the recesses of the car to a trash can. A golden bounded from his crate and peed, with evident relief, on the circle of designated grass. The teenage daughter emerged from an iPod trance to slap her little brother away. Mundane as the scene was, Mike felt like he was peering through the looking glass into a dream world.
Hank was talking again: ‘Graham’s out of Sacramento, and Burrell’s last-known had him in Redding. Those cities are, what – two hours apart? That region of Northern California’s looking interesting, but to be honest, I don’t know what to do about it.’
Mike reined in his thoughts. ‘So if it’s a state agency, can I appeal to the feds for help?’
‘No way,’ Hank said. ‘These guys coordinate heavily with the Feebs, and Homeland Security, too. They’re probably the only state agency with this kind of federal pull.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Mike made an effort to lower his voice. �
�Graham can’t believe I’m a fucking terrorist.’
A door slam alerted him to the fact that Kat had gotten back into the car. She was sitting in the driver’s seat, upset, hands on the wheel as if she were going to drive off.
‘No,’ Hank said. ‘But labeling you a terrorist means he can pursue you like one. Your double background plays into it, makes you fit the mold. And now throw a few bodies into the mix – not exactly hard to build a case around you. Or an accident.’
‘So he’s looking for a fall guy for something?’
‘Maybe. But given your family history, my gut says he’s cleaning up a mess.’
‘What mess? It’s not like my father could’ve been an enemy of the state. We didn’t even have terrorists back then. And even if he was, I was four when we parted ways. What could I have possibly known?’
‘Seeing as how Graham’s having Roger Drake and the Burrell boys carry out his dirty work, clearly this isn’t official state business. Playing the terrorist card is just the most effective way to run you down.’
‘So he’s in someone’s pocket,’ Mike said.
‘Given his stature in the law-enforcement community, it’s a big pocket.’
‘But he’s got no real evidence on me. How’s he getting everyone to fall into line? I mean, Elzey and Markovic? They were up my ass, now they’re all over the hospital. Are they dirty, too? Did he bribe them?’
‘You don’t get it, Mike. Once you’re fingered, you’re fingered. The Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station covers, what? A hundred eighty square miles? They’ve got rich assholes in Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake, and po’ white trash, crackheads, and cowboys in Chatsworth. Now they get a notice from a state agency that you’re on a terrorist watch list, you think they’re gonna . . . what? Try ’n’ prove you’re a nice guy? No. They want to pick you up, kick the case to the state, and get back to the mound of complaints from the constituents whose vote the sheriff needs come election time. They’re not gonna participate in patently illegal shit, but they will suspect who they’re supposed to suspect and alert who they’re supposed to alert. It’s not a conspiracy – it’s delegation and resource management.’
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